Forms

Designing a page in Canva

Every event sign-up page and every public form comes with your parish's standard look. When something deserves better — the parish festival, a big appeal, the school open house — you can design that page in Canva and bring the finished artwork back into Vianney. Canva supplies the look; Vianney keeps the working parts, so the real sign-up fields still sit on the page and the answers still come to you.

You will find it in three places: an event's Page design card, a form builder's Design tab, and the Integrations — Canva card under Settings → Parish.

Connect your Canva

Connections are per person, not per parish. Each staff member connects their own Canva account, and the designs you start are yours — they land in your own Canva files.

1. Click Connect your Canva. The button is on the Integrations card in Settings → Parish, and also right there on an event's Page design card or a form's Design tab, so you do not have to detour through Settings.
2. Vianney hands you over to Canva. Sign in there and approve the access it asks for.
3. Canva sends you back to Vianney's Settings page. Go back to the event or the form, and the design button is ready.

If a colleague has connected and you have not, you will see a note in place of the button — connect your own and it turns on for you. Disconnect your Canva, on the same card, stops designing for you only: nobody else's connection is touched, and anything already applied stays on the public page.

The round trip

The card walks you through Step 1, Step 2 and Step 3. Only the steps that apply to you right now are shown, so it is never more than one obvious thing to do.

1. Step 1 — start it. Click Design this page in Canva. Vianney composes a starting design from the page as it stands — the wording, your parish logo and color, and a block standing in for each field — and imports it into your Canva as a new file.
2. Step 2 — design it. Click Open your design in Canva; it opens in a new tab. Move things, restyle, change fonts and backgrounds to your heart's content. Leave the {{tag}} blocks where they are — those are the spots the real fields will fill.
3. Step 2 — come back. Switch back to the Vianney tab and press I'm finished — check Canva. Vianney fetches your finished design from Canva.
4. Step 3 — look, then apply. A preview appears, with a line saying how many fields it managed to place. Press Apply to make it the public page, or Discard to throw that round away.

Two things people get wrong, and they are worth saying plainly:

Canva's own Return button is not the way back. Whatever Canva shows you inside its editor, the button that matters is I'm finished — check Canva on the Vianney side. Just switch tabs and press it.
Nothing goes live until you press Apply. A finished design can sit in preview all afternoon; the public page does not change until a person applies it.

Changing it afterwards

Edit it in Canva (Step 2) re-opens the design. Change what you like, come back, press I'm finished — check Canva again, then Apply again.
Design this page in Canva in Step 1, when a design is already live, starts a new one. Vianney asks first: the current design stays live until you apply the new one, and the old file stays in your Canva account.
Reset design (Step 1) starts over completely — it abandons the design rounds for this event or form and, if a designed page is live, returns the public page to the default look. The design files themselves stay in your Canva.

Full page, or just a header

An event can have a full-page design: your artwork is the page, and the real name, email, phone, party size, date-picking and Submit controls sit inside it.
A form gets the same treatment when it has no logic rules — however many pages it has. Each form page becomes one page of the same Canva design, and the Next and Submit buttons are designable too.
A form with logic rules gets a designed header only, and the Design tab tells you so. A field that a rule hides would leave a hole in the artwork, so those questions keep their standard layout.
Fields that come in parts travel to Canva as parts, so you can place them where they look best: a name arrives as First, Middle and Last blocks, an address as Street, City, State and ZIP, a yes/no question as its two pills.
Anything the design does not place still appears, in a plain section below the artwork. Delete a block over in Canva — or just one part of one, say the ZIP box — and that whole question drops down there rather than splitting itself across the two. Nobody is ever blocked from answering because a block went missing.
On a phone, the standard layout takes over. Narrow screens always get the ordinary page, so a design laid out for a laptop never squeezes a parishioner out of signing up.

Returning to the default look

One button, on Step 3: Return to the default look. The designed page comes down immediately and the standard parish page takes over. Nothing is deleted — your design stays in your Canva account, and Step 2 still offers to re-open it whenever you want to try again.

What Vianney sends to Canva

Only facts that are already public:

The title, and for an event its date and location.
The description, or a form's intro wording.
Your parish logo and brand color.
The sign-up link, as a QR code.

Parishioner information is never sent to Canva. No names, no email addresses, no list of who has signed up, no answer anyone has submitted. What travels is the look of an empty page; the people and their answers stay in Vianney.

Printing

There are no Print flyer or Print QR poster buttons any more — printing happens in Canva now. The starting design already carries the sign-up QR code as an ordinary picture you can move, resize or delete, so once the artwork looks right, print or download it straight from Canva.

Good to know

Publish first, design second. The QR code only rides into the design when the event or form is already published — until then there is no public link to point it at.
Save a new form before designing it; the Design tab will ask you to.
A design belongs to the person who started it, and comes back through their connection. If Marie started it, Marie presses I'm finished — check Canva.
Every punchout imports a fresh Canva file stamped with a number — "Parish Picnic · design 3" — so a pile of rounds still reads at a glance.
If Canva cannot be reached, or the design was deleted over in Canva, the card says so in plain words and offers Check Canva again or Discard. You never land on an error page.
If Canva has not been switched on for your Vianney installation at all, the card simply says so and every page keeps the parish default.